On community and harmony
Thoughts around the relationship of order, common goals and community building
There are several amazing articles, threads and essays around communities and community-building.
Some of the brightest minds are digging deep into the relevance of content, the trends of consumer social startups and community-driven companies, the importance of design for belonging… and so much more.
I want to add to the discussion a “human studies” point of view. I believe we can understand better how to create the best communities if we understand why they are natural for humans, how we experience the connections inside them, and why we feel belonging or FOMO in the face of the best communities.
This is going to be the first of three posts around the nature of communities. Here I will focus on the concepts of order and harmony and their implications for the development of any community.
The second text will focus on the nature of communities as something property of their members, and why this place a big challenge for community builders while rewards content creators.
Finally, in the third essay, I will develop the idea of the relationship of the members under two concepts: subsidiarity and recognition.
Let’s go then.
Communities and harmony
Communities are “ordered” systems. Yes, they are free and evolving but when you are in a community you are inside a set of given rules and structures. That’s why an academic community feels and behaves differently from a gaming one, for example.
For me, order is hierarchical1 harmony among the diferent2. To better explain what I mean by this let me paraphrase Vitruvius and say that order is the right balance of the parts separately, and the proportion as to the whole3.
A healthy community requires the right balance of their elements (content, members, etc.) and a good proportion or ratio among them. Can you imagine a great community without creators or lacking self-actualization?
Balance and proportion. Or in other words: harmony.
Based on that, we can understand that balance and proportion are the first principles of any community. A community is configured by how harmonic are their immanent relationships.
Let me stress this out: What has to be harmonized in a community? Not the individuals but their relationships and the goals or ends of those relationships4.
In the words of David Spinks: “Relationships are the atomic unit of community.”5 And he is right: although persons are an element that constitutes the communities, as I said in this other post, relationships are the atomic unit; their harmony, the first principle6.
Being said that, I think it makes sense now to address that this phenomenon is not accidental.
Communities are a consequence of our gregarious nature as human beings “for man is not a solitary or unsocial creature, but born with such a nature that not even under conditions of great prosperity of every sort is he willing to be isolated from his fellow men”.7
This is amazing, is it not? Not even the richest of men can live outside a community. We crave belonging, and we thrive when we belong. Be part of something is critical for our physical, mental, spiritual health.
We can deduct from this that communities per se have for goal creating some good for their members. Why? Because communities are collections of human beings brought together intentionally in a partnership for a common good8.
And the best harmonized is the community, the better it will deliver that good for its members.
This is why I believe so many emerging communities fail. It’s not easy to harmonize different people with different roles and expectations, with content around shared intentionality.
If the future is social (community-driven, that is) we should start focusing more on how to engineer this order… after all, community building is an art really close to architecture or music.
To finish this text I want to share a thought about the idea of “vectors” in startups.
Dharmesh Shah, the founder of HubSpot, was once on a small gathering where he met Elon Musk. He recalls one idea Elon shared that resonated with him: “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”9
What Elon meant is that every person inside a startup has both magnitude and direction, or in other words: they have power to do things and direction (intent).
Then progress (towards a common goal) is determined by the alignment of all the persons-vectors. And from there, Dharmesh conclude that “is vectors all the way down”
Every piece of content your marketing team produces is a vector.
The partnerships you forge should be aligned vectors. It’s just not just about magnitude (i.e. how big is the company you’re partnering with), but how aligned is the partnership with your goals.
Do you see how this connects to the idea of community and harmony? What Elon was saying is that the success of a community is determined by the harmony of its parts.
Traditional, holacratic, or any other kind is the same.
Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics III (1078a36)
Cf. Vitruvius, On Architecture I
Cf. Aristotle, Politics III (1274a38–41)
First principles, or just principles, are those original causes of something in terms of being, acting and knowledge. I am using First Principle here in the sense of “being”. Also, you can hear about these First Principles, here:
Cf. Cicero De Republica I, 25
Cf. Idem.